Foreskin’s Lament

By Shalom Auslander
310 pp. Riverhead Books, 2007 $24.95

Reviewed by LiDoña Wagner

Shalom Auslander was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in New York. He is screwed up, paranoid, and overwhelmed by sexual obsessions. He became a teenage criminal, he believes, because of his culture’s belief system and the way it was forced upon him. He calls it “theological abuse.”

Auslander describes his victimization throughout the book: “Eating non-kosher meat was bad enough; if I ate it combined with non-kosher cheese, God would never let me out of the pool alive. He’d bash my head on the diving board. He’d give me a cramp in the deep end, whether I waited a half hour or not.”

Auslander interweaves the narrative about theological abuse with the story of his nine-month journey toward fatherhood. It is his wife Orlie’s pregnancy and the ensuing discussions about how to raise their son that triggers awareness of his “theological abuse.” 

Through humor, Auslander offers a reprieve from the book’s serious, weighty and sometimes-disturbing material: “Orlie’s mother is Egyptian. Her father is Bukharan. Their house is in London, but most of the year they reside in the sixteenth century.”

The climax of the two narratives comes near the end of the book as Auslander and Orlie decide whether to have their son circumcised. The author’s identification with the discarded foreskin gives rise to the book’s title. Foreskin’s Lament is not a pleasant read but persons who are intrigued by the many sub-cultures of American life will find it an interesting exposé of an Orthodox Jewish upbringing.

I tried hard to like this memoir, but in the end I had to admit that his little peek into Orthodox Jewish life was disheartening. What kept me reading was Auslander’s craftsmanship in developing two parallel narratives and his occasional bursts of humor.